I am an entrepreneur, consultant and PR junkie. Hailing from the UK, I founded the US operations for Cognito, a global communications firm for the financial sector, in 2005. I write regularly on entrepreneurship as well as corporate communications issues, particularly in the financial field. I am a columnist for PRNews and often serve as a judge for various industry awards, including the PR Platinum Awards and the Financial Communications Society Portfolio Awards. When I am not writing for Forbes, you can find me working with major financial firms or leading media relations and client management classes at MediaBistro.

Forget Your Ideas! 3 Things More Valuable Than Innovation

Do you have an idea? Chances are it isn’t a good one. From eugenics to the Segway, history is littered with terrible ideas. Selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees? Bad idea. Bombing Pearl Harbor? Really bad idea. Installing a tape recorder in the Oval Office? Stupid, stupid, stupid. Some ideas achieve popularity and even financial backing but still suck no less hard for it. The Titanic cost over $400 million (in today’s money) to build but they still forgot the lifeboats. Prohibition passed both houses of Congress by an overwhelming majority and was ratified by 46 states but still ushered in the worst period of criminality and bloodshed in American history. Even geniuses aren’t immune from bad ideas. Thomas Edisoninvented a concrete piano and Alexander Graham Bell spent the last 30 years of his life trying to create six-nippled sheep.

Because there are so many awful ideas and relatively few good ones, the law of averages dictates that yours – whatever you’re dreaming up right now – is probably one of the duds. It could be the next facebook but it’s more likely the next pets.com.

However, there’s hope. Because it turns out there are three things far more valuable than ideas:

1) Execution: Having an idea and acting on an idea are two different things. Before giving in to his ovine udder fetish, Alexander Graham Bell was best known for inventing the telephone. Only, of course, he didn’t invent it. He was merely the first to patent it. Thomas Young was the first to seriously conceive of deciphering the Egyptian hieroglyphs, but it was Jean-François Champollion who published the first book on the subject, based on much of Young’s work, winning him the recognition and getting the museum built in his honor. Steve Jobs famously ‘invented’ the computer mouse by visiting Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center in 1979, looking at a $300 mouse they had created and then coming back to Apple and designing the same thing that could be sold for a twentieth of the cost. History, it seems, favors the patenters, the publishers and the mass marketers, not the ideators.

2)Principles: When we founded Cognito in the US, we had a one way plane ticket to Boston, a four-night stay in the Parker House hotel, and a laptop with a missing Shift key. What we didn’t have was new ideas. We knew little to nothing about the US market, had zero competitor research and certainly weren’t trying to build a better mousetrap. Instead we had principles. Through our work in the UK we strongly believed that customers – wherever they were – valued a deep understanding of their business, a high-touch level of service and outsized delivery. If this doesn’t sound very innovative that’s because it wasn’t. But it was enough build a multi-million dollar PR company with offices in six locations worldwide, with or without that Shift key. Those founding principles were enshrined in a book we called the Cognito Way and I carried it in the laptop bag with me on the one-way plane ride over to Boston.

It reads: “Dan, take this to the US and build us a business! Tom. 24th October 2004”

3) Hard work: As concrete piano inventor, Thomas Edison, famously said “Genius is one percent inspiration, ninety-nine percent perspiration”. But of course you would sweat a lot playing a concrete piano. The point is that hard work trumps originality every time.

Someone once told me that there is no shortage of advice in the world, just a shortage of willingness to take it. All the instruction humanity will ever need to be happy and successfully has already been written down – e.g. weight loss is about exercise and calorie control – but we constantly seek out new guidance to put off implementing what we already know is right. By the same token, ideas can be viewed as a cop-out for hard work. There is no shortage of ideas but certainly too few people with the time, energy or dedication to implement them successfully. You could never have an innovative thought in your business again but through tireless application of common sense – in essence the collective creativity of generations – you can still achieve amazing things. The biggest enemy of success is laziness not unoriginality.

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